Garou's foot pressed forward and sank into the soil.
He held the position—weight forward, every muscle in his arms and shoulders declaring intention—and breathed through the urge to move. It cost him something. The pressure Jordan had put on him a year ago hadn't faded the way most impressions faded. If anything, the distance of twelve months had clarified it, the way certain things become more visible when you step back from them.
He looked at the man standing in the forest light with his hands in his pockets and located the feeling precisely.
Same as the old man. Not identical, but the same category—the specific quality of a person standing in front of you whose defeat you cannot currently arrange in your mind. He could see the path to the ground from almost anyone. This man: nothing. Same blank wall as Bang.
He brought the urge to attack back under control.
"Is there something you need?"
Jordan raised an eyebrow.
He reasoned himself to the right answer. The thought arrived with genuine appreciation. At fifteen, in a body primed to attack, facing something he can't read—and he reasoned himself to the right answer. In terms of practical intelligence, this was already past where Atomic Samurai had been before he'd taken a punch to the face. Progress, of a kind.
"I happened to be passing through," Jordan said. "I saw someone training hard in the heat and stopped to watch."
Garou's expression did not believe this at all.
"Really." The disbelief was flat and complete. "You just happened to be passing through."
"That's what happened."
"In the middle of a private forest. Behind a dojo. On a mountain."
"I'm a hero," Jordan said, entirely serious. "I have no reason to lie to you."
The deliberate emphasis on hero landed somewhere in Garou's chest that he didn't want it to land. His knuckles tightened. Their eyes met across the space between them, and something moved in Garou's expression—not quite wariness, more like a man checking whether a door is locked.
Does he know something?
"I should mention," Jordan said, tapping his temple once with one finger, "I'm what the Hero Association classifies as a 'superpowered' type. Abilities that ordinary people don't have."
Garou waited. "What does that have to do with me?"
"There is a connection." Jordan looked at him without urgency. "One of those abilities is that I can read other people's thoughts."
A pause.
"I can see exactly what you're thinking."
The forest was quiet. Somewhere distant, a bird.
"Garou." Jordan's voice was level. "You want to become a true monster. Absolute power. Something the world can't ignore or override."
The words hit.
Not like a punch—more like a hand reaching through a wall Garou had spent years building, finding the thing behind it, and simply touching it. The specific wound of something that had been kept private and protected suddenly being visible. His body reacted before his mind authorized the reaction: shoulders back, spine straight, the reflex of exposure.
In the quiet of his nights, when the training was done and the dojo was silent, he had turned it over and over—the fundamental injustice of the system, the way heroes always won by definition because the rules were written to make them win, the way the world called anyone who challenged that arrangement a monster and handed them nothing but proof that they were right. He had been working toward something. Something that would make the arrangement irrelevant.
For a moment, he wanted to deny it.
Then he stopped.
He lifted his head. Let the sneer come, because it was honest. "So what if it is?" His voice was cool and deliberate. "Heroes interfere in everything. Isn't this just more of the same?"
"You're quite direct about it." Jordan said this with something that wasn't quite surprise—closer to pleased acknowledgment. "I expected more deflection."
"Are you going to tell my master? Have him expel me?"
"Is that how you think this works?"
Garou's sneer sharpened. "Try it. The old man hasn't taught me anything new in months. Whatever dojo I belong to means nothing—the expulsion would change nothing about what I'm building." He let the words land. "So if that's the threat, you can keep it."
"What if I simply removed you?" Jordan asked. His voice stayed conversational. "Eliminated a destabilizing factor before it became a problem."
The forest held the question for a moment.
Then Garou's hands came up.
The Flowing Water Rock Smashing Fist opening stance—the form he'd learned here, that he'd rebuilt into something different, that was now neither Bang's style nor its own thing yet, still becoming. His feet found their placement in the soft soil.
A cool wind moved through the trees and lifted fallen leaves around his feet.
"Then I have no choice." The words were quiet and without performance. "I'll risk everything to protect what I believe in."
Jordan looked at him.
Fifteen years old. Standing in a forest with his hands up, prepared to fight something he couldn't beat, because the alternative was surrender—and surrender was something his structure apparently didn't include.
This is why Bang can't reach him, he thought. It's not that he won't listen. It's that listening would require temporarily putting the thing down, and the thing is load-bearing. He doesn't know what he'd be if he put it down.
He scratched the back of his head.
If he weren't heading toward becoming Saitama's problem, he'd be someone else's protagonist.
The thought had barely completed itself when the wind shifted.
Garou moved.
He'd been watching Jordan's attention drift inward, reading the moment correctly, and launched. A leaping jab—not the Flowing Water style, something faster and more direct, the product of his own development rather than Bang's curriculum.
Jordan's mind caught up a fraction late.
Spider-Time activated.
The world slowed. In the stretched moment, he looked at the approaching strike and made a quick decision about how to handle this conversation. How much force can he currently take? He ran the assessment. Sixteen years old. Years of training. Physical condition well above civilian baseline, approaching a capable young adult fighter. Not fragile. Not close to what he'd become.
A-Class ballpark. Treat him accordingly.
Time resumed.
Jordan's hands came up and started working.
He blocked. Checked. Redirected. Garou's initial advantage—surprise, momentum, the burst speed of someone who'd been training tree trunks to death all morning—disappeared in the first two seconds as Jordan's defense absorbed the information and adjusted. Fists met palms. Elbows found blocks. The sounds of impact came in irregular bursts through the trees.
Garou's face went tight.
He's not using any technique. The realization arrived mid-exchange and disrupted the rhythm of what he'd planned. He's just reading me and putting something in the way. No counterattacks. Just—
He shifted. Flowing Fist signature: the Tooth-Piercing Finger, fingertips aligned, aimed at the eyes—a fast precise attack that required a specific response and offered a window behind it.
Jordan turned his head. The strike missed. His palm came across and swatted it aside.
Garou didn't wait. His right foot was already moving—Scorpion Tail, a fast low kick redirected upward, the muddy sole cutting toward Jordan's face.
Jordan's eyes narrowed.
Eyes again.
There were conventions about this. Jordan had opinions about conventions. He reached down, caught Garou's calf on the follow-through, and used the wolf's own momentum against him—the rotation of the kick becoming the rotation of a throw, eighty kilograms of determined sixteen-year-old redirected from horizontal to ballistic.
Garou hit the tree like punctuation.
The impact shook loose a rain of bark fragments and sent birds departing from higher branches. He slid down to the roots and landed in a crouch, breathing hard.
Jordan stood in the settling dust.
"Aiming for the eyes twice in under a minute," he said. "That's uncivilized."